Hunger Journeys (12 page)

Behind him, from the bedroom down the hall, Lena heard her mother cry out.

She scrambled from her bed and into her clothes, oblivious to the frost that had formed on the blanket or the clouds that her breath made in the frigid room.

“I’m going for the doctor,” Father said, and he was gone.

Lena emerged into the hallway to find Piet standing outside Mother’s door, tears pouring down his face. Bep was at his side, her shoulders heaving. In the bedroom, Mother wailed again.

Lena looked at the closed door and thought of the weak, broken woman on the other side. She straightened.

“Piet, boil water,” she said. “Bep, Piet needs your help.” She waited until they had disappeared into the kitchen, reached out her hand and opened that door.

Mother looked as if she was trying to crawl backwards up the wall at the head of the bed. The blankets and sheet had fallen from her; her hands were behind her on the wall, her feet pushing at the mattress. Her eyes were squeezed shut, but tears nonetheless found their way out and snaked down her face.

“Mother,” Lena said, “I’m here.”

The pain seemed to end for the moment. Mother sank back down onto the bed, her nightgown riding up her thighs as she did so. Her eyes opened, and she looked at her daughter. “I’m not strong enough for this,” she said.

“Yes, you are,” Lena said, glad that the right answer was clear to her, though not at all sure that it was true. She reached out and pulled the hem of the nightgown down, pulled the sheet and blankets up. “It’s freezing in here. Let’s cover you up!”

She heard her voice, cheery almost. Where did that come from?

The doctor did not arrive for three hours. Lena managed to keep her prayers silent, but she sent off a steady stream. “Please let the doctor arrive before the baby comes. Please let the doctor arrive before the baby comes.” On and on she prayed, as she let her mother grip her hand when the pains came, settling her back down under the blankets when they were over. She got warm water and a cloth from Piet and wiped her mother’s forehead and neck. She made soothing noises. She countered her mother’s despairing words with pat assurances. And she prayed and prayed and prayed.

The pains seemed to get worse. Mother seemed to grow more desperate. Once, when her mother screamed, Lena bit her own lip so hard that she tasted blood. “Please let the doctor arrive before the baby comes. Please!”

And at last, he did. She saw him look her mother over. She saw the worry in his eyes. And she saw him push aside that worry and decide to get down to work.

“You’ve done a good job, young lady,” he said. “Now out with you.”

Lena waited in the kitchen with Bep and Piet. Father paced the hallway. Any blame he might have felt toward his wife for allowing herself to get pregnant seemed to be washed away now with fear.

Lena’s prayer changed. “Please let Mother and the baby live. Please let them live.”

They had to put up the blackout paper again before Mother’s cries stopped.

Soon after, silence fell, the door creaked open and Father was ushered into the room. Lena waited for what seemed like forever, then tapped on the door herself. The doctor opened it. “Come on in, all of you,” he whispered.

Lena saw blood first. A lantern had been lit in the room, and it illuminated the bloody sheet heaped on the floor at the foot of the bed. She saw bloody stains on the bed itself as well. A blanket had been pulled up over Mother’s chest, and she was half sitting, leaning against the wall, holding a small bundle. Father stood over her, looking down at the face that the small swaddling exposed.

The baby was tiny, wrinkly and badly in need of a bath, with scant black hair stuck down on its head.

“Nynke,” Father said. “You have another sister, and her name is Nynke.”

Mother was silent; her face, even in the lantern’s glow, was grey.

“The doctor said she might not have enough milk,” Father went on. “He said your mother is starving. The baby came too early and your mother is starving.”

Lena stood in the dimly lit bedroom looking down at her sleeping mother and the tiny baby, now a few days old, tucked up beside her in the big bed. That tiny, hungry baby. It had consumed Mother from the inside for almost nine months, and now it was trying to consume her from the outside. But Mother had little to give. Lena didn’t know which one of them to worry about most.

She reached down and lifted the baby bundle away from her mother’s side. Mother shifted, but she did not open her eyes. Lena tiptoed out of the room and into the slightly warmer kitchen. She sat down on the chair between the stove and the window, where the weak January light could reveal her new sister’s face.

She pulled the ancient baby blanket back, just a bit. And she gazed.

Nynke’s eyes were tightly shut, kind of crinkly. Her nose was the tiniest nub, like a new growth, and her mouth was … her mouth was perfect. Lena didn’t know if Nynke looked like her or anyone else in the family, but she certainly looked like her very own small self.

A quiet voice, a wondering voice, spoke next to her ear. Lena almost started, but she managed to hold still. It was Bep. Only Bep.

“You’ve got her,” Bep breathed, and the words floated into the room, dusted with wonder.

Lena turned her head slightly and smiled, almost overwhelmed with love.

Margriet had returned from her journey the day before, and there was food in all their bellies and milk in Mother’s breasts, at least for the moment. But the warm feeling inside Lena was caused not by food, though food made it much easier to feel it, but by a person, a brand-new special person.

Best remember this, she thought, as Bep tilted her head to the side so it rested on Lena’s shoulder. Together, they looked at their new sister.

Then the front door slammed, and Lena did start; in fact, she jumped enough to wake the baby. And Bep sprang away from her as if they were doing something wrong.

Angry wails filled Lena’s lap and spread to greet Father as he practically stormed into the kitchen. “What’s going on in here?” he demanded. “What’s that baby doing away from her mother?”

“I was just—” Lena started, but the creak of a door interrupted her. She was on her feet by then, and she stepped into the hall just in time to see Mother in her thin nightgown, leaning against the wall for support.

The baby’s cries grew louder, if that was possible, and Father bore down on Mother and swept her into his arms. She sank against him.

“You’re supposed to stay in bed,” Father said, speaking into Mother’s hair as he steered her back into their room. Lena followed, cooing in Nynke’s ear in a desperate attempt to quiet her,
while wondering at the tenderness she was witnessing between her parents.

Moments later, Mother was settled in bed, Bep was taking Nynke from Lena’s arms and placing her beside her mother, and Father was striding from the room.

“Time to start on dinner, Lena,” he said in passing. He paused. “And no more sneaking around with the baby. Your mother could have been hurt, coming out of bed like that.”

Tears of frustration shot into the back of Lena’s throat.

“Well,” Father said, “what do you have to say for yourself?”

Lena had followed him into the hall. It took her two tries to get the words out. “Yes, Father,” she said at last. “I’m sorry, Father.”

He gave a single nod and went on into his study.

Lena walked into the kitchen and stopped, her hands in tight fists at her sides. A gasping sob escaped her. Just one. She cast around the room, saw the paperback she had been reading earlier, grasped it and sent it flying. It settled in a corner, its weak spine snapped at last. Then Lena yanked open the root cellar and wrested the last sugar beet, the ugliest yet, from its depths.

When she stood, Bep was there in the doorway.

“Can I help?” she said in her soft voice.

“No, you can’t,” Lena said.

Bep stayed where she was, shoulders slack, lower lip trembling.

“Oh, leave me alone, can’t you?” Lena said, her voice a little softer now. Soft enough that Bep dared to enter the room and lean up against the table near her sister.

Dinner preparation was under way.

“Almelo,” Sofie said. “We’ll go to Almelo!”

Lena stared at her.

“Well, you said you want to leave, so let’s go!

“I didn’t mean …”

“Of course you did. Your family’s starving. So is mine, but you’ve got six people to think of. Plus yourself. That little baby could die, Lena. She could die!”

Lena thought about reaching out and slapping Sofie. She imagined the smacking sound, the satisfying feel of her hand making contact, the shock on Sofie’s face.

“We’ll go somewhere where there’s lots to eat, too far away for the hunger journeyers from the cities to reach. Almelo is far away. It’s almost in Germany. And I know people there … family.”

Lena put her hand in her pocket and her violent impulses out of her head. “How would we get there?” She was just humouring Sofie, really. “You said something about train tickets?”

“Yes,” Sofie said, jumping up from the stone step where they were huddled in the late January cold. “Train tickets to Almelo. I know exactly how to get there. I’ve been there. My mother …”

She paused.

Sofie’s expression, eyes downcast all of a sudden, puzzled Lena. She did not seem fully committed to her crazy idea.

“If we’re going to go somewhere,” Lena said, “why don’t we go to Maastricht instead, or leave the Netherlands altogether? Let’s go somewhere that’s already liberated!”

Sofie laughed. “Yes. We’ll swim across the Rhine while Germans shoot at us with machine guns. It will be an adventure!”

Lena smiled at her. “So you acknowledge how impossible
that
is. Well, we can’t just go and buy train tickets, Sofie, even if we had money. They’re not letting Dutch civilians on the trains.”

“We won’t
be
Dutch, Lena. We’ll be German. I’ll get tickets to Rheine. That’s not far across the border. We’ll say we’ve been living here for the whole war. We’re sisters.”

Lena looked at Sofie. She couldn’t imagine two girls looking less like sisters.

“And our mother has just died, and our father is sending us to our grandparents in Rheine.”

“You can say all that in German?” Lena asked.

“Hey, I’m good at languages, remember? And Juffrouw Westenberg said that I have an excellent German accent!”

Lena changed tack. “You don’t know what they’re like, the German soldiers. I dealt with them when I went to the country with Margriet, and what she goes through when she goes alone …”

Sofie shrugged, and Lena fought down a wave of annoyance. “My German is much better than yours, and I’ll bet it’s better than Margriet’s too. The soldiers will see lovely young German women when they look at us. We’ll be fine.”

Lena was silent for a long moment, struggling with herself. She could feel herself getting sucked into Sofie’s plan, even
though she knew it was dangerous. Terribly dangerous. Still, if she didn’t give in, Sofie would just keep at her.

“How about the tickets?” Lena asked. “How will you get those?”

At this point, the excitement leaked out of Sofie’s face and a little bit of fear showed in her eyes. They had left the land of fantasy.

She knew a man, she said, a Dutch railway worker who had not gone into hiding when the strike started. Or rather, her stepfather knew him. That man would help them. He could get them tickets and escort them right onto the train. He could also help them get false papers. Sofie would need to take Lena’s identity card, to use the photograph on a new one, a German one.

Lena had never in her life thought of doing anything even remotely like this. It was a terrifying plan, filled with flaws. But it would mean that she could try to get food back to her family. She would find a way. And even if she failed, even if packages failed to arrive, hers would be one less mouth to feed. They would have her ration card and could use her rations for themselves.

From her pocket, she withdrew the hand that had ached to slap Sofie’s face and held out her identity card to her friend.

Sofie beamed. “We’re going,” she said. “We’re actually going!”

Two more weeks passed before Sofie had the tickets and the identity cards. During those weeks, Lena stayed home as much as she could, and went in terror on her wood-gathering missions, knowing that at any moment a German soldier could ask to see her card.

Each day, Lena worked in the kitchen, helped with the baby, sat at the dinner table, all while her secret grew and grew.

Once she had the new card in her hand, her terror deepened. Now she was German. Her name was Aubrey Schulze. She imagined looking up at a German soldier and convincing him that she was the girl on the card. She could not. But there was no going back. She would never have a legitimate identity card again.

In the end, it was actually hard to leave, even putting aside her fear. When she held Nynke in her arms for the last time and felt the weight of her and the life in her; when she hugged Bep and remembered the little girl’s head on her shoulder, felt her loneliness and longing; when she looked at her brother, so full of purpose; and even when she thought about her bossy big sister, her greedy father and her pale and fading mother—she felt love. Some of that love surprised her.